Salads at 4th of July cookouts and summer picnics tend to fall into a few worn-out categories. Mayo-laden potato salad. Greasy pasta salad. Maybe a tomato salad if you're lucky. Salads and side dishes get short shrift next to the blazing grill and charcoal taste of those cheeseburgers, or the splendor of the blueberry flag cake. Well, that shouldn't be so. Here are 15 summer salads that offer delicious summer taste, and something fresh, something new for your summer picnic table.

The other benefit to many of these salads is that they don't involve a lot of mayonnaise. Many don't even have dairy! This is safer for salads that will be sitting out in the heat; mayonnaise and sunny picnic tables just shouldn't go together, at least not for very long. Most of these salads opt for olive oil or yogurt instead of mayo, and they all will hold up just fine in the summer heat.

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Sara Kate is the founding editor of The Kitchn. She co-founded the site in 2005 and has since written three cookbooks. She is most recently the co-author of The Kitchn Cookbook, to be published in October 2014 by Clarkson Potter.